Soartech and Herk Stokely
04-23-2008, 03:19 PM
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Soartech and Herk Stokely
Those of us that have been soaring for a long time know of Herk Stokely and his wonderful Soartech range of books. Well Herk is still around and doing his bit to educate us heathen types in the wonders of this hobby. His website was pointed out to me in another thread and I found it to be a rich source of things to order as well as to download.
Herk has graciously provided the early Soartech journals as free downloads and is still maintaining the publishing and selling of other journals including the orginal Selig treatise "Airfoils at Low Speeds" that was a huge influence on the development of airfoils that we often take for granted now. In addition there's some follow on books of the subsequent testings that kept the series growing and maturing to an even more valuable contribution.
There's also some links to online resources for stability calculators and other calculators that you'll find useful.
And they are still selling the old David Fraser "Sailplane Design" performance analysis software. I've got this program from years ago and despite it being a DOS effort the data it provides is phenomenal. Sink rate vs speed charts, L/D vs speed charts as well as tables showing a wide variety of factors that the model is seeing vs flying speed. Like lift coefficients for both wing and stabilizer, drag coeffient for the wing, estimated drag coefficient of the fuselage, pitching moment of the wing, etc, etc. It's a trifle funky to use but at least with our new computers you won't have to wait for 5 minutes to calculate charts with multiple traces for different airfoil comparisons.
And no I'm not a shill for Herk, just an enthusiastic customer from years gone by that wants to bring this valuable material resource to the attention of the new generation of flyers, builders and designers.
http://www.soartech-aero.com
Herk has graciously provided the early Soartech journals as free downloads and is still maintaining the publishing and selling of other journals including the orginal Selig treatise "Airfoils at Low Speeds" that was a huge influence on the development of airfoils that we often take for granted now. In addition there's some follow on books of the subsequent testings that kept the series growing and maturing to an even more valuable contribution.
There's also some links to online resources for stability calculators and other calculators that you'll find useful.
And they are still selling the old David Fraser "Sailplane Design" performance analysis software. I've got this program from years ago and despite it being a DOS effort the data it provides is phenomenal. Sink rate vs speed charts, L/D vs speed charts as well as tables showing a wide variety of factors that the model is seeing vs flying speed. Like lift coefficients for both wing and stabilizer, drag coeffient for the wing, estimated drag coefficient of the fuselage, pitching moment of the wing, etc, etc. It's a trifle funky to use but at least with our new computers you won't have to wait for 5 minutes to calculate charts with multiple traces for different airfoil comparisons.
And no I'm not a shill for Herk, just an enthusiastic customer from years gone by that wants to bring this valuable material resource to the attention of the new generation of flyers, builders and designers.
http://www.soartech-aero.com
